If you couldn’t get antibiotics or tampons at CVS anymore, where would you look? If a shipment of cattle feed was about to come in short and fly off the shelf at your local farm store, could you make a friend who might tip you off, or even let you reserve a few bags? That’s the “doomsday scenario” that we’re most likely to see: not the multitrillion-dollar flow of international trade turning off at once like a spigot, but cascading shortages, brownouts, delays.
A bad wind is blowing through the farms and supply chains. The steader preparedness three-step is
Store Food
Grow Food
Reach Out
Or more generally
Stock up
Build your own capabilities for self-reliance
Get to know people
Store Food/Grow Food
Here is your plan for storing food and growing food
Let’s talk now about reaching out
Reach out
The steader principle of fostering human-scale relationships isn’t just for the spiritual benefits. Its also a time-tested principle for weathering hard times.
The best time to make a robust network of friends and family was 40 years ago, when Grandpa and Grandma had a big, tight-knit family who went on to have big, tight-knit families of their own who all stay close. But on the remote chance that’s not you, nil desperandum. (If that is you, keep those ties alive and maybe even have an extended family chat about who has what capabilities and what skills and supplies your network has. But also reach out beyond the family). Check out the Social Preparedness article below and go over the steader list of simple steps. Pick at least one to do this week.
Here’s some more advice culled from multiple people’s hand’s-on experience.
Meet your neighbors. No need to be coy about why. Say, “I just thought I shouldn’t wait until an emergency to find out who the neighbors are. I want you to know if you need anything you can count on us.”
Do service. One man instantly integrated into a new neighborhood by looking for oddjobs people needed help with, and then helped them. Loan out your truck.
Talk to old people. They have a lot to share, and they will usually tell other people about you, expanding your network without you even being around.
Ask advice. One of the great benefits of learning new capabilities and putting together food storage is the chance to ask advice It’s a great way to meet people. People like to give advice and they like people who ask for advice.
Meet your local master gardeners or local farmers. Purchase their stuff or, see above, ask advice.
Join your volunteer fire department or police reserve or fraternal organization or church.
Talk to you local grocery store about bulk food (this one is interesting, we’ll explain).
Pray about what you can do to prepare and follow through on any feelings or ideas you get in the prayer.
Counsel with your family or your closest friends about what you all need to do to prepare, and follow through with any group consensus or personal insight.
Good thread here that one of us came across.
The assumption here is that you already have at least one basic skill and a few basic supplies to offer. You don’t want to be a complete freeloader. If not, fix that.
Local Grocery Store
This is a method accidentally discovered by one of the steader wives.
A local grocery store had out a little pallet of lentils for ridiculously cheap. 25 cents/pound. (The lentils were officially expired). She bought a bunch, put out the word on facebook to friends and family, pretty soon it got bought out. Next week, there was another little pallet of lentils. Same thing. So she asked to speak to the manager.
“Hey, we really appreciate you putting out these cheap lentils.”
The manager was grateful. He had seen an opportunity to get some lentils for very cheap and bought them as a way of helping out the community. But he couldn’t really put the word out, it didn’t fit with the store’s marketing image (Super Cheap Expired Lentils!)
“By the way,” he said, “we still have about 5 times as much in the back, we are a bit overwhelmed by it.” He had had this generous impulse and was now wondering if he had bitten off more than he could chew.
Again, word gets put out, contact is made at the food bank who says, yes, they could use some. Long story short, this woman’s family ends up with around 500 pounds of lentils for pennies; a number of people in the community now have anywhere from a week to a month or two of food storage that they didn’t before; the food bank got stores; and the manager felt really really good about his generous, community-minded impulse.
The story doesn’t end there. A month later, the manager calls up the woman. “I bought a few tons [literally] of butter that’s expired or about to expire. I knew you could get people who would be willing to buy it. I’ll sell it to you 3 pounds to the dollar.” Same thing, facebook, text messages, the store has sold their entire supply, and the buyers are organizing little butter canning demos and canning parties for each other.
This was all recently, in the middle of the shortages.
Talk to your local grocery stores. Meet the manager, say there are lots of people in the area interested in stocking up as times get hard, and if he ever sees bulk expired food, would he be willing to purchase it as a form of community outreach? Give him your number, tell him you will put out the word. Then ask sympathetically about how business is going and what some of the challenges he’s experiencing are.